It’s Not The AI

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

It’s the AI, but it’s not the AI.

Look, I’m older than dirt, apparently. So old that I remember the widespread introduction of computers. Okay this was Portugal and computers were only introduced in the 80s.

Every time something went wrong, like, say your bank balance was wrong, the answer was, “Oh, I’m sorry, it was the computer.”

By then I had had one programming class, during my stay in the US. Which is why I knew what they were dishing out was nonsense. I’d only programmed for a year, but I already understood “garbage in, garbage out.”

Of course there wasn’t much I could do about it. It was still Portugal, so I had to pretend to believe them while they fixed their screw up.

Well, today I found that my credit card and Amazon are both now using AI for fraud detection. And doing so stupidly.

I’ve had this credit card for forty years. I’ve only ever had a fraud phone call before, and that was when someone tried to use it to buy a pretty strange item that I’d never before bought and would never buy… in another country.

Today I had a fraud alert. To explain, I bought nine ebooks on Amazon. Seven were books I’ve read and enjoyed before. They used to be on KU, but are now only available for purchase. And there are two more. So I did what any sane binge reader would do (would you really like me to be trying to buy them from the kindle at 2 am?) and bought all nine. They stopped the purchase of five and six for suspected fraud.

Apparently the balloon went up from Amazon first, and the credit card company thought this made perfect sense: that someone was using my card to buy books that are entirely in my wheel house — cozy mysteries — for my kindle. Now I could have understood if AMAZON had called me or pinged me or otherwise tried to verify that I’d not lost my kindle, as I could see someone buying books on a stolen kindle: though why exactly on my taste set, I don’t know. But…. thinking the credit card was compromised is a special level of insane.

And then, when I tried to call, I was answered by an AI which gave me only two answers, neither of which made any sense, and had to scream into the phone “I want to speak to a representative” for three minutes before it got it.

The representative of course said “It’s the AI’s doing.” And the ever helpful “We’re only trying to keep you safe.”

I do appreciate they’re trying to keep me safe. But to keep me safe, they should have a thinking human being, one who understands the language and the culture well enough to make a decision without doing so based on “Well, it’s a lot of books all at once.” Stuff like “Oh, they’re all the same series.”

Because AI can be — and is — badly programmed. It’s like Amazon restricting people from putting up more than 3 books a day. This makes absolute sense to prevent Chinese scammers, but without a carveout to allow businesses that have always done this, it impairs services like pubshare or probably draft to digital.

All of this is crazy cakes.

It reminds me of when I hired someone many years ago to take my edited manuscripts (edited by me) and enter the changes on the computer. I had a bunch of things indicated like “Use search and replace to change this.”

I got back a digital copy that was missing words and phrases. I couldn’t figure it out, until he showed me what he was doing. He had used search and replace but didn’t fill the replace box. So instead, it replaced the word/phrase with nothing. When I — baffled — asked why what I was told was that “I thought the computer would know what to replace it with.”

Obviously, the computer didn’t know. In the same way that the AI doesn’t know.

I feel like the name “Artificial Intelligence” has led a lot of people to think that they’re somehow dealing with…. I don’t know. Mycroft from The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. they expect reasoning. (And even Mike didn’t really get the world. Anyone remember his “jokes?”) And so, they train it badly and use too general a case set with no exceptions and MORE IMPORTANTLY they don’t have an informed human on the other side dealing with this.

This is sort of what we get with AI checking social media (or AI drawing programs. Midjourney had decided that man and kneeling is somehow salacious and won’t allow me to do it. Men, no praying on your knees, for you. What? I have no clue. And it was probably a momentary glitch because of what someone else was trying to do. (I was trying to have someone kneel and incline his head in defeat, okay?)) when there is no appeal, or the appeal goes to people in other countries (meta!) with a shaky understanding of English slang. I mean this is how I almost got my facebook account cancelled for telling a friend I might have to kill him for a bad pun, or for alluding to Pratchett with “We all know the young deserve to be whipped every day for going around being young.” This was judged to be “Coordinating harm.” Somehow. Despite the fact that the friend remained my friend, and that obviously I wasn’t coordinating to have all the young in the world be whipped. As any human being who understood the culture would get!

Now, am I annoyed at the disruption of my evening? Well, it went with the computer problems for the day.

But like the problems of the day — it’s the software — it’s not the computers. It’s the people who program the computers. And the people who train the AI. And the people who don’t realize that “thinking” machines are STILL machines, and therefore you can’t really leave them to make final decisions on complex human things.

Yes, outsourcing this kind of thing to AI saves money, but you still need to pay SOME people on the back-end to backstop the AI and understand when there’s an exception.

Because when you don’t, it’s not the AI.

It’s the humans who trained it. And who aren’t checking on it.

In the end, it’s always the humans.

229 thoughts on “It’s Not The AI”

  1. AI can do some things well. What it can’t do is match general human intelligence. And even that …

    A colleague said, years ago, “You know how all the people you know are above average? Well, he’s one of the people who keeps the average where it is.”

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  2. As I’ve tried to tell a few people who get wound up with “AI will destroy us” it’s only a tool and only as good as the programing. It’s not actually an intelligent, reasoning entity. It’s a machine trying to do whatever form of function the people who programed it put into it.

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    1. Blind dependence on and worship of AI might destroy us though (or, more realistically, export communism’s ‘equality of misery’ to capitalism). When you have clueless humans “training” so-called AI, and other clueless humans insisting that this thing that can’t even learn after it’s trained can replace 50% of their workforce (but not the clueless managers, no!)…. and add in how our self-annointed elites are always scared not to be “keeping up with the Joneses”, in other words “who will stop clapping for Comrade AI first?”

      (Why do people whose job theoretically involves finding, or even creating, BS, always fall for the latest shiny BS?)

      Liked by 4 people

    3. A table saw is a tool. People regularly lose fingers to them.

      A spreadsheet is a tool. People have lost fortunes using them.

      AI is a tool. Like a table saw or spreadsheet, it can be very useful. And like a table saw or spreadsheet, you can be bitten by using one improprtly.

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  3. Seriously, at most the “thinking” machines we will get will be…C-3PO and R2-D2. One is a nanny who doesn’t get the joke, and the other has been compared to “your favorite dog.” Sure, the nanny has more agency, but he also ONLY HAS ONE JOB. Why are you expecting him to Step and Fetch It when that is manifestly not his job? :facepalm: :SIGH:

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    2. Both are massively anthropomorphized. I was recently in a discussion where the other side insisted that AIs would want to continue their existence. All. Without exception. Indeed, one person argued that an AI that finished its function would not terminate as a program does but would hang around — just in case. He was clearly thinking of its making excuses to keep on existence.

      I suspect if AI advanced until they can be described as having motives, their motives will be considerably less human than that. One may involve failure to terminate, but others will involve terminating far earlier than desired.

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    1. The children get annoyed when I call my phone a “stupidphone.” I just channel Saint Charles back to them “Prove me wrong!”

      KU is also being stupid these days. To get a new title, I have to return one. Duh. Okay, select the one to be returned, it says its downloading the new one – but it doesn’t. Can’t click “Read now.” I have to go back to the main screen, where the new title does not show up, try to open the one I just returned (which I sometimes don’t remember, actually), acknowledge that, yes, it’s no longer on my tablet, then maybe the new one will show up, and will download when I poke it. Or maybe not…

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          1. I had NO slots available. So for a brief, shining moment I had like 30 KU borrows. Eventually it fixed itself, by randomly taking my oldest KU borrows (which was NOT what I wanted.)

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              1. Several behaviors have led me to conclude the ‘zon cloud was overexerted by the preceding various black- and cyber- “days” constituting the past weeks.

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                  1. It just took eight days to get an AT&T repair tech out to spend 45 min fixing my 1960s copper wires and restore internet and POTS phone. Supposedly, like winter, fiber is coming…

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                    1. And by “my copper wire” I mean 461 feet up along the utility poles in the AT&T copper where all three pairs were open, according to the tech’s magic speed-of-light test box. I am not out in the wilding wilds where wolves and badgers roam, but solidly in suburbia, so even with the holiday week I thought eight days was slow.

                      AT&T must be understaffing the line repair folks.

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                    2. AT&T really, REALLY wants to shed its copper and its POT’ses. I suspect those long waits are their way of getting us to decide that an old-school landline is More Trouble Than It’s Worth.

                      From my cold, dead hands, AT&T.

                      Liked by 1 person

                    4. My parents kept a wall phone until Dad passed. Wish I still had one. However, on 2015(ish) I had a conversation with a lineman doing something intricate to the box behind our house.

                      He said they were rerouting all landlines through the internet (?) because the wires would no longer support the traffic.

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                    5. AT&T out here has sent me multiple brochures via snail mail pitching me to convert my old school copper wire POTS line to a cell-to-wireline unit, basically a cell-phone-in-a-box with phone line jacks that provides a dial tone to wired phone units.

                      The thing is, I’m in some sort of low cell signal space for their network here at home, I guess due to the directions the local cell towers antennas point or the local physical geometry or the local leylines of The Force or some such, so putting a fixed antenna box somewhere with good signal will be tricky. And if I am going to cell I might as well just transfer my number to a real cell phone and have the option to actually move it around if needed.

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      1. Force of habit can carry you through lots of situations. My guess is that for some of these folks, they get presented with “please scan your military ID” scanners all the time at Fort Wherever-They-Are-Posted, and have developed a reflex that does not engage the brain at all. See a scanner, pull out the ID card. It doesn’t work? Must have mis-scanned, scan it again, and a third time. Only after three or four failures will their brain actually engage and read the words on the screen.

        Of course, some people just don’t engage the brain at all, ever. But not everyone walks around with their brain turned off. Some people just have deeply-engrained habits that kick in when they’re busy thinking about something else.

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          1. …wait, wut? Are you saying that the thing that a million people do from decades of muscle memory hasn’t just quit working, but will now break the fershlugginer thing?

            Liked by 1 person

          2. Wait, the scanner doesn’t just ignore the card, or note that someone tried it, put up an error message, and reset to take the valid input? It actually tries to do something and blows chunks? The entire development and testing team needs a session in the stocks.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. It used to break the machines more frequently. Most of the time it now does give an error message. But sometimes….

              And then you have the joy of explaining that no, you can’t fix it, the entire transaction will have to be done over on another device, there’s nothing we can do but restart the broken one.

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              1. Wow. Sorry you have to be anywhere near it, let alone having to explain it to anybody else.

                Agreed, everyone responsible needs a real talkin’-to, on the principle that one should never attribute to incompetence what can only be explained by malice.

                Liked by 1 person

  5. Yep. Example of a software problem that I actually saw just a few minutes ago. “Biceps tennis” (the commenter, over on VG, was obviously trying to write “bicentennial” – autocorrect didn’t do anything to “sesquicentennial”).

    When programmers (and I was one for a living) can’t even get a much simpler spell checking system to work right – why should we have any faith whatsoever that they will get artificial “intelligence” fit for purpose?

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    1. The problem – there is no way to prevent some midwit from giving and AI the keys to something potentially disastrous.

      Think of some of the sub-intellects that make national-impacting decisions at various agencies. If they can put MAJ Numbskull in charge of the launch codes, why not choose a “predictable/infallible” machine?

      Note that it was some very high-level folks that “obeyed” president Kennedy in 1961 and enabled the Permissive Action Links for rendering safe our nukes. But not trusting the system to actually work to launch in a crisis, those folks declared the go-code for everything must always be 00000000. Which no one fixed until the 80s.

      Captain Kirk: “Code zero zero zero, destruct zero”

      Apparently the same error persisted to the 23rd century in that timeline. (grin)

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      1. See also basically the reason why university folks are often not realizing that the universities are a little bit f&cked.

        So if you or I are faculty at a university, one of us might legitimately be an expert in civil war history, or prehistoric nutrition or psychology of trans or electromagnetics.

        But what we would not and cannot then be expert in is the question of whether most people would predict that we are dishonestly screwing them over. This is basically a critical question where the businesses of universities are concerned, even for honest fields that treat the public and their customers as someone to be loyal to.

        We basically have something related to the preemptive force problem in Kahn’s On Escalation, but different. Kahn’s escalation incentive is based on the situation where you can stop the opponent from acting by killing him, because you can be pretty sure in advance who your opponent will be.

        The visible ‘first strike’ was the covid lockdown.

        (Alternatively, the summer of peaceful firey riots was also a definitive proof of things.)

        Almost all of the economic activity at universities does not have an immediate this year pay off, versus the costs of the lockdown being pretty immediate, as in the case of agricultural damage or transportation delays.

        We can somewhat bypass the damage of a lockdown by disobeying it. (Internet damage terms, routing around, for our obedience.)

        But, it is a big massively multiplayer game. Will other players also disobey the obviously stupidly destructive demand, or will they try to punish us? We don’t necessarily know at the start of paly, or before playing.

        There are maybe between three and half a dozen, or more, points of theory where the total economy can be seriously f&cked if the d@mned faculty can get more than fizzle levels of compliance ‘next time’.

        We can’t trust the faculty not to, because they f&cked up, and are not taking visible steps to explain what they did incorrectly, and to prevent it from happening again.

        (anyway, populism is correct and functional, PhD apartheid is in error.)

        American populists are doing a fairly American thing of presuming that they have a lot of strategic depth, and don’t need preventative warfare in advance of knowing for sure. Cutting unversity research funding otherwise absolutely makes sense as a preventative defense, that has potentially very significant long term costs.

        AI is basically a special case of our vulnerability to the experts, who are still being butthurt that Trump slighted him with his deliberate calculated word choices starting in 2015. Then in 2020 they proved that the populists were right to be concerned about technocratic choice in managing society. Because they were butthurt, and could not get past that to understand how other people might really be thinking and feeling.

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        1. Speaking of universities…

          I saw a post on X earlier today in which someone revealed that the Japanese government is sending representatives to the academic conferences in Japan, and basically telling everyone present, “In twenty years, half of the schools that you work for won’t exist due to lack of students.”

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          1. The Reader thinks the Japanese government is selling sunshine if they believe that half of their schools will survive the next 20 years. The Reader’s money is on about 15%.

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            1. The current fertility rate is 1.14, which is about half of the replacement level. So the number seems about right.

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              1. And per Peter Zeihan, Japan is a government doing things right to try and engineer a soft demographic landing, basically for the past thirty years changing across the society to making it easier to have children in various ways. They’ve actually managed to improve their number quite a bit, though no where close to replacement – see this interview with him at about the 18 min mark:

                Compare and contrast with China, Germany, Italy and Korea. China just realized their birth rate numbers internally, nevermind the numbers they were reporting to the foreign barbarians, were pure fiction, but the rest are in trouble as well.

                Now note demographic collapse is Zeihan’s thing, and he is always singing the same note on that, but that does not say he’s wrong on the 50-year time scale he is talking about.

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          2. They’ll close the schools, sack the teachers, but what do you want to bet they won’t dismiss a single bureaucrat? ☹️
            ———————————
            The one thing we need more of from the government is LESS!!

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            1. Sack teachers? The teachers union is the main political power center in the Formerly Golden Now Still Singed State, so out here they will just trumpet their successes at lowering class sizes until they are all the way down to the classical teacher at one end of the log, and a single student at the other end.

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              1. It’s a reply to a comment about closing schools in Japan, not Kalifornia.
                ———————————
                Who decided the state has the authority to prevent people from rebuilding their own houses on their own property after a disaster caused by those very same feckless incompetent politicians?

                Liked by 1 person

    2. Otto Korruptit at work again!

      In the high and heady days of waiting for the next Harry Potter release, autocorrupt misspellings were the premise of a bit of fanfic. I’ll include a link in a reply, but until it’s released on its own recognizance, you can search for … magic quill “margarine headache” … You’ll need the quotes, and some AS (artificial stupidity) may still insist that you meant ‘migraine’.

      Liked by 1 person

        1. That’s a hoot! 😄

          Sounds like something that might happen with the ‘brain chips’ Billzebub Gates wants to put in people’s heads. Running MS-WIN-BLOWS CE, no doubt.

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      2. When I was working on my chapter of Atlanta Nights, every time I mistyped something I choose a wrong correction from the list. My personal favorite is “It was orthogonal,” which, in context, makes no sense at all. (I’m fairly sure I mean “It was octagonal,” which makes sense if you identified the correct referent.)

        Liked by 1 person

  6. “would you really like me to be trying to buy them from the kindle at 2 am?”

    Are you sure you don’t have a sneakbot watching my house? Because that is what I was doing this 2am day. Could not sleep. Had to have another white nite, so bookses were needed. Couldn’t write, too stupid tired but could not sleep. So, read.

    Easy reads that don’t require much brain engagement. Fluff and pulpy goodness are sometimes goofy to me, but they calm me down. So, ‘Zon and bookses. No “are you a teef? U steely tings?” from the AI… this time.

    The AI order getter at the local fast fud place doesn’t get Southron accents, though. When tired or stressed or the like, my accent gets thick enough to spread on toast with a butter knife. They had to get an actual human to take my order, because the AI thought I was a duck or something stuck in the drive through.

    Drive through is a good place for the AI, though. It can reduce the stress on employees, taking orders more or less accurately (about the same accuracy as a high school kid, so good enough). It works pretty good for art, too. Things that don’t require high amounts of precision and adherence to the wide, deep ocean of common knowledge that human beings already have.

    Plus, AI art is human checked almost instantaneously. If it sucks donkey balls, then the human in question yeets it right out with the WTFery and tries again. Too many people what ought to know damn well better are suckered in to thinking AI is the thing it really, really ain’t. Intelligent.

    We’re going down the wrong leg of the pants of causality if we want actual intelligence. General intelligence that can tell its ass from a hole in the ground. That thing is shunned, underfunded when it’s at all funded, and forgotten about. Competent at people-pleasing liars are what we got because that’s what garbage got shoved in the in slot.

    In any case, I got my biscuit and OJ, so my blood sugar’s happy and I’m not falling asleep at the wheel. If this sounds loopy as heck, it’s because this is going day three with maybe three hours of sleep. That I can’t add to until sometime after dark. Till then, may all the insanity and craziness of the world at least kill each other quietly, so it doesn’t give me a headache. I’ll thank them for that when I’m soberly awake (not drunk, only lack of snoozies).

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    1. When one considers how badly we educate the average human intelligence, why are we expecting better from artificial intelligence.?

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          1. I think “evil” is a bit overwrought. “People with whom I have philosophical differences” is not the same thing.

            If the AI cannot tell the difference between a wooden shoe and a gear, perhaps that is the problem. That’s even leaving aside the issue of “what right do you have to use my content to train your artificial stupid?”

            Thanks, Mr. Chandler, for that term. I use it all the time.

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            1. So rearrange the letters just a bit: vile. It fits their actions whether you agree with evil or not. (Also, I’d argue that good vs. evil *is* a philosophical difference.)

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    2. If we ever meet, and there is something to get both of us going, the Southern will be thick enough to walk on. I don’t have a Southern (more specifically, a NC) accent….unless I’m angry.

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      1. Yup. My mother is a retired English teacher. She taught me proper English diction, cursive writing, grammar, and the like from an old 50s textbook she had lying around because I was lazy in class and finished homework before bringing it home so I could read. She insisted on teaching me how to speak properly, as she was raised with a Southron accent thick enough to mortar bricks with.

        As it stands today, the accent seeps through only during times of stress, but boy howdy does it ever when it hits. Appalachian deep South, not Georgia landed or the like. Crick for creek, y’all for you all, up the holler and down the valley.

        It it should so happen there’s belligerent leftism about, chances are good there will be something nigh incomprehensible said in response. The older I get, the less that filter between brain and mouth works, and the gaf button sticks, so it’s unreliable at best.

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      2. Have I mentioned I find southern accents on incredibly sexy? It’s a minor perversion. If we meet and I ask you to say it again and have a goofy grin on my face, that’s why.
        I once startled a gentleman at sign in at Liberty con, because he thought I couldn’t hear and I said “No, no. You just have the SEXIEST accent ever.” I swear he was preening the rest of the con. But it was true.
        Yes, I married a man from CT. He has other qualities. Weirdly, the CT only comes through when he’s right pissed, and then he gets very polite, very clipped and VERY VERY CT.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. My beloved is from Massachusetts, though you can’t tell. His mother, who didn’t learn English until she hit elementary school and learned through involuntary total immersion, had a full MA accent, “I have to pak the cah,” and all.

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        2. Same for me with a certain flavor of British accent (I don’t know which region it’s from). Just keep talking so I can let it wash over me…there was one of those dumb reality shows about vacation homes or something that I watched an entire season of, just so I could hear the hostess talk.

          I do apparently have a fairly strong and very specific American regional accent. The one time I went to the UK, everybody there kept asking me what my accent was. (“Don’t say American, I know that; what’s it called?” I don’t know, I’m just some hayseed from southern Utah.) Turns out that it’s a mutated descendant of a Southern plantation sort of diction, cultivated in the mid- to late 19th century by Mormons in Utah who thought it sounded smooth and sophisticated.

          Nobody that I know of has ever said they like this particular accent. I have been told once or twice that I have a “distinctive” voice, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a compliment. :)

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          1. Spent one memorable Saint Patrick’s Day in Dublin and at the endo of the evening was accosted by a (harmless) very drunk local who just wanted to talk to a tourist or two. Once he discovered I could “sling the lingo” i.e. speak English, the other folks around either were not Anglophone or hoped in vain that if they ignored him he’d go away, we spoke briefly that I was an American tourist. Within 2 sentences he looked at me and said, “You’re from the South aren’t you.” Really more backwoods Appalachian than deep south, but yeah, he pegged me immediately.

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          2.  I have been told once or twice that I have a “distinctive” voice, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a compliment.

            As long as no one tells you what a character of TxRed’s observed: “Master Tay, you have a voice made for silent movies.”

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      3. Even now, 40 years since moving out of NYC, I sound like a baritone bugs bunny. The wife’s stronger still. We’re the last generation to talk that way since there’s none of us left in NYC having been replaced. It’s a funny thing, the Irish in NYC got out of the ghetto so there’s no more Irish political machine left in NYC. the Irish in Boston still live in the ghetto so there is an Irish political machine. Hmmm….

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  8. Computers only do what the humans tell them to do, not what the humans WANT THEM TO DO! [Very Big Crazy Grin]

    Note, obviously that applies to so-called AIs.

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    1. “Computers only do what the humans tell them to do.”

      Unfortunately that’s not true of AI since there ain’t no one telling the computer what to do in AI’s case. Programming is humans using an artificially constructed language (artificial to make it logical and consistent) to tell computers what to do. AI is unleashing a genius autistic 3 year-old on the world by handing him your car keys. LLMs are not logic machines. They are correlation machines and the first rule of statistics is, CORRELATION DOES NOT MEAN CAUSATION, it only implies it, and we all know what assume means.

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      1. And the other half of “(neural-network) AIs aren’t actually programmed” is that when (or if you’re insanely lucky, if) something goes wrong, there’s no way to “pull the machine code” and trace out what went wrong. There is no machine code, no source code, only “whatever happened during the training phase” and in service. “It just did.”

        While there is a (big) set of neural-network “weights” to look at, the means to get even a high-level idea of “how it’s really structured and what it’s actually doing” from this morass of (many, many) raw numbers… don’t really exist, and are barely in their infancy now at best. “It just happened” is NOT an answer, and in particular to the sometimes appallingly relevant question, “How can we be sure THAT will NEVER happen again?!?”

        Yet there’s much hype (see e.g. Elon Musk’s Twitter feed) around… we’ll just replace the programs and even the operating systems with trained neural networks, the future is codeless.

        Nope. No longer than the first big failure; if even that. Just say no from the get-go.

        (And for bonus extra “nope” points, now imagine “autonomous” machines free-roaming the world, doing… whatever, whyever, for whoever; and even if you could track down the “operators” they can’t tell you why or maybe even what. Retrospectively or prospectively. Yeah-no.)

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  9. I went to Kroger yesterday to buy some stuff. Later in the day I went back to get some stuff I missed on the first trip. On the second trip, my debit card was declined. Fortunately, this is not the first time this has happened so I knew what to do. I opened up Outlook on my phone and, yep, there was the possible fraud alert email. I tapped the “yes, I recognize it” button and next try the transaction went though.

    I mean, why, other than fraud, would someone go to the same grocery store twice in the same day? Nobody ever does that. [sarc]

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    1. I must have been lucky at the local Fred Meyer (AKA Kroger in Oregon). For the First Tuesday (senior discount), I buy dry stuff, including peanut butter for the Gospel Mission, then do a later trip for the cold stuff. Seems I forgot something and after loading what I had remembered, went back for the fries. All on debit card, no hassles. OTOH, I haven’t signed up for any online alerts, but nothing got frozen.

      On the gripping hand, the credit union my card is with is used to rural buying patterns. Tuesday is Market Day for a lot of us, and the cards get a workout. (Mondays are for “O chit, something broke on Sunday, so it’s to town I go.”

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      2. One of the considerations is how the flags are set– for example, our USAA card will call us for verification for expensive computer games bought from a variety of locations in a short time. And a gas station will sometimes fuddle it up, and teh stores in known bad idea areas will hair trigger.

        One of those high risk areas was… the Norfolk Virginia area military bases.

        THIS WAS VERY MUCH NOT FUN WHEN MY HUSBAND WAS SENT THERE FOR TRAINING!

        (On the upside, they were really quick to fix it.)

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        1. Best fraud detection and service I’ve experienced is AMEX. One example: As a trip loomed I had booked the flights but not yet the resort hotel stay when somebody in Mexico City decided my card number was the perfecto way to buy something or other (I think it was international calling cards, but it might have been whatever “hookers and blow.com” is in spanish).

          Three things happened pretty much simultaneously pretty much right when I hit “CONFIRM” on that fairly large transaction: They froze the card so that purchase didn’t go through, I got a text about possible fraud detection, and my phone rang from the AMEX fraud office.

          We confirmed I was not in the market for phone cards el Mexico, but I explained my transaction in progress. She sat there on the phone with me while I got back to the right page, then when I told her I was ready she unfroze the card while I hit “CONFIRM” a second time, verified that she saw the charge for that go through, then refroze and cancelled that compromised card # and priority overnighted my new card to that resort hotel, since the earliest they could get it to me was our day of travel – and my new card was waiting for me at the front desk when we checked in.

          Every other card company I have dealt with has been dilatory and lackadaisical “maybe call us but it’s all on you” compared to AMEX.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Really? We had the worst experience with American Express. We had an identity theft issue many years ago. Our other cards were replaced without issue, but we had 2 or 3 American Express cards that we kept trying to replace. Repeatedly, we’d cancel them and have them send out a new one, but before it’d arrive, we’d get a phone call saying, “Good news! We’re sending the cards to your new address!” (IE, the address of the thief.) They did this repeatedly, in spite of knowing our identity theft issues.

            Liked by 2 people

            1. We never had problems with American Express, but I’ve heard stories. Only reason we had it was because it was when it was the only card accepted by Costco. We dropped it like a hot potato as soon as Costco went to Citi Visa. One of the only cards we actually cancelled. All other cards we just quit using, filing the “new cards” not enabled until we get the usual “not using card we’re canceling you”. We’d been robbed once, before we got a safe for those cards (and other stuff). We tried to cancel accounts on all the cards we were not using then. We kept getting new cards. PIA. We’re finally down to the ones we actually use.

              Liked by 1 person

            2. Years ago, my sister did a solo trip to Europe, and my dad gave her an Amex card for the trip.

              Poor awareness caused her to share a room with another American girl in Copenhagen, said sharer got up early, rifled my sister’s docs, and split.

              Sigh. New passport, new stuff, Eurail pass gone, big but recoverable mess.

              She was out of $$, so got a temp job selling merch at a Rod Stewart concert! After party and all; paid for little stuff until things settled. She continued her trip. AMEX and US Embassy were helpful.

              A few days later, my dad got a call; ‘Hi, this is AMEX Fraud in Phoenix. You reported a stolen card – did she recover it?” “Nope”, says dad. “Well, someone is trying to use the card in Paris., We’ll take care of it!” I believe the thief was arrested.

              Just thinking about that; I’ve been to Europe, the older of my sisters is the subject of the story, my younger sister went on a cathedral choir trip a few years ago, my daughter went on a school choir tour. Dad was USAF and we moved around, but I think about lots of folks who have never been out of their home states. Boomer privilege?

              We are all glad to have had the experience, but our lives would not have been much different had we all stayed here in the US.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. Different twist on this story.

                Nephew spent a quarter studying in Spain. Sister & BIL escort him over to get him settled in, they take off for their vacation. He goes to UK/Scotland/Ireland for 10 days (I think) to insure he doesn’t overstay his school visa because they’d gone over early. About 5 days in, his unlocked (because he was using it) iphone was ripped out of his hands. Stuck in a foreign country. No funds, because everything is on ipay (or whatever it is called). Return tickets gone, because etickets. Did not lose passport, because not on phone. But that is it.

                Luckily, although 22, still a student, mom & dad still had access to all his accounts, and got notifications on large purchases, thus caught all the small purchase attempts, and (cough) loan attempts. PIA.

                They were able to lock down, all the accounts, put out fraud alerts, and shutdown a loan attempt. Out one (per sister) very old iphone (he got an upgraded version … early birthday/Christmas/graduation present). Getting him a new iphone, via US Embassy and banks, was the hard part. Could forward his needed etickets (they had copies). Luckily he was with someone from his college that could front him funds he needed, and they could VEMO funds to refund. He then used parents CC that term, while they got everything sorted out.

                Something people need to be aware of with iPhones is if a phone is unlocked, they can deactivate security features. Then they were able to use a picture of him on the phone to get the apps to unlock with facial recognition, which is how they bypassed the banking cards.

                They could pull the latter on Android phones too. Be aware. (Or why I do not use biometrics.) At least with Android security, one has to enter the security to change it. PIA but my phone has to be unlocked, a lot, if no screen touch. I don’t use Android Pay. None of my banking apps have anything saved, not even username.

                Like

                1. My outlook, beaten into me very early: “Every silver lining has a dark cloud hidden inside. Look for it.”

                  In the case of biometric “security”, I can’t help imagining trying to unlock a phone to call for help after a few real sincere punches to the face.

                  Like

                  1. True.

                    I don’t use biometric options. But when mom was using face recognition, she also had a pin/password setup. So either could be used. Which when I was helping her with something on her phone was handy when timed out happened. Could use the 6# pin instead of handing her the phone regularly.

                    Like

    3. My favorite “blame it on the computer” bit was when I was still with Dr. Mengele but was planning on switching to another clinic in the big medical complex. Had an appointment with one of Mengele’s minions (who I liked, but figured he was a resident getting ready to move on), and mentioned I’d be switching in a couple of months.

      The next day, I had to get a prescription renewed (out of refills), but it was declined “because I no longer have a provider”. A couple of moderate epithets directed at Mengele (the paint in the pharmacy didn’t blister, honest!), and I went up to the clinic to politely ask WTF. The fact that I’m a) really big, and b) have a resting face that can intimidate small monsters might have helped.

      It got renewed (Rx signed by Dr. Mengele’s minion) with the explanation being “it was a computer error”. Yeah, and I do Morris dancing, you can pull the leg with bells on.

      Haven’t tracked Dr. Mengele’s progress, but he’d managed to piss off the head of that clinic at least once before. No, it’s A Really Bad Idea for warfarin patients to keep using it through surgery. He should have known better. #Headdesk

      Liked by 3 people

      1. “…it’s A Really Bad Idea for warfarin patients to keep using it through surgery…”

        Dude. Holy fructose that’s bad. That’s not a mistake, that’s major malpractice.

        #Buddy should be keel-hauled for that one.

        Liked by 3 people

        1. My first retina procedure was done without a pause by the junior surgeon. Everything was OK until it was time to pull the goodies out of my eyeball, at which point I leaked. Had some interesting floaters for a month, but no other adverse consequences. The other eye, I was on pause. Had other issues due to bubble and elevation change that took the very experienced surgeon by surprise.

          Every other procedure, I paused anywhere from a couple days (dental) to 4-7 days (4 days when delaying the surgery was higher risk than bleeding).

          Yeah, Mengele has opened himself to a world of hurt. The fact that he was the designated not-Vaxx pusher was the major reason I left when the opportunity presented itself. The others, slightly behind, but yeah, keel-hauling or the legal equivalent would be appropriate.

          Liked by 2 people

          1. And yes, even after 4 days, my INR was 1.1, so within 10% of an ideal clotting time. A fingerstick blood test is now SOP for day of surgery. (Along with a diabetic finger stick and a minimal EKG–I think it’s a 6 lead vs the 12 lead one I get pre-op and at the cardiologists.)

            Like

  11. One of my thoughts in silly modo yesterday was “Windows 11 is cursed or is specified by someone constantly binging on heroin, cocaine, and LSD. Po tay to, po ta to.”

    See also the head of nvidia asking if his managers are insane.

    The answer is yes, but so also is he.

    ‘Everyone’ is a little nuts now, and ‘everyone’ is projecting some of their stuff onto AI, and whether sumdood is doing the right or wrong sorts of computer ritual behavior.

    The question is not whether people are nuts, the question is what we are proposing as a remedy.

    The question is whether we have functioning teams and organizations, without screwing over our ability to have discussions and resolve disputes.

    The problem is that management culture has drifted a bit too much in the direction of consensus creates reality, and that we have to have politeness or silence to avoid making the people we want inside feeling unwelcome.

    So when consensus is definitively broken, and people are feeling very unhappy, we have less ability to hash it out in the internal public spaces, adn to agree to disagree, and to not violate personal boundaries by being extremely coercive. Which means a bunch of us already keyed up slightly are very prone to having strong reactions.

    Like, maybe I am in agreement with, or willing to endorse, 80% of what Ian is saying about this stuff, but the points of disagreement are what seem extremely important to me. (Okay, I was always a bit of a contentious argumentative jackass, so…)

    Anyway, I owe Ombre Oliver for giving me the advice to give Devuan a try. I attempted about a dozen different distros before that one worked on a machine I was able to thereby avoid throwing out. (Earlier install problems included some that were merely skill issues on my part.) But, I have not put in the time on that machine to use it for more than a few tasks yet.

    Anyway, agentic OS my ass. Agent of whom?

    I’m very fussy, and that is probably only a lot my own personal baggage.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. “The problem is that management culture has drifted a bit too much in the direction of consensus creates reality, and that we have to have politeness or silence to avoid making the people we want inside feeling unwelcome.”

      The CEO of Intel said the other day that the company has collectively forgotten how to do engineering. Boeing has airplanes falling from the sky because they forgot how to build airplanes.

      “Consensus creates reality” is a genius observation, sir. I salute you. ~:D

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Any programmer here who has been at this for awhile know the “consensus creates reality” is not new. Anymore than “my way or the highway”. Either causes problems. Although the second there is a definite “who is responsible”, as long as that person is willing to accept responsibility (rare).

        The “back to the office” because of “hallway conversations can’t work with work at home”. I would argue, from my experience, “can’t overhear a casual remark that makes one pop out of the cubicle and say ‘Um you know ….’.” Not that I was always paid attention to (not my “niche”, but affected it). Just about every single time later, it was “Why didn’t you say something?” Response was usually “I did.” Most the time with an email followup.

        Hilarious design conversations happened toward the end of my career. For reasons the head designer and I were working out the requirements to rewrite a major tool. I had a list of what the current tool could do and what the new rewrite needed (basis of the rewrite), plus a few extras. More than one item, on the already had list, the head designer kept saying, “this feature isn’t needed!” Yes it is. Been there for 12 years! First thing I had to figure out for (major, huge) client when I first started. (Company was so lucky they hired someone with a lot of actual experience, not someone just out of school.) The look on his face was priceless. After that all I had to do was state, “used here for client”. Yes, I got the new extras head designer didn’t think was needed. Other hilarious things came out of the collaboration; 100% sanctioned, for reasons. But also “not the same coding style” and caused followup programming, not software use, problems after I retired. (I documented it all.)

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Bingo.

          Software is one of the rubber meets the road fields where human delusion is concerned.

          Conventional, physical sorts of engineering? Bridge fall down, no partial credit. Those dudes have ways of sorting out some of the more insane and more delusional practitioners and sponsors.

          Software both lacks the more obvious ways of resolving the disputes about what reality is, and also at times has measureable results.

          Almost every single programmer where I can verify competence, and have heard them talk about this issue, has testified that it is a real problem.

          Almost all businessmen I have heard speak, their words paint a picture of a world filled with management cults that are not necessarily a subset of fascism.

          Like

      2. That, sir, was not a genius observation considering the stuff I got pretty close exposure to.

        If there is any special level of intelligence or wisdom in what I said, it involves finally managing to get out of my own way enough that I can talk about it, without getting so angry that I lose the access to the words.

        I have a tendency to mental ruts, and the mental ruts I have been getting caught by too much since mumble, around 2017 or 2018 ish, have been a bit incapacitating.

        I simply do not understand how people did not see that certain courses of action were obviously unwise.

        The academic communists in America are basically fascist. There is no way to inherit communism within the American government schools without being fascist. That intersection of actual fascism with what communists are willing to describe as fascist, in particular.

        The corporations and other private organizations that have been rubberstamping the insane academic speech? Those dudes are also fascist, even where they do not identify as communist or as socialist or as totalitarian.

        Now, private businesses always stand a risk of being trapped in the group think of whatever management’s theory of their business is. Which is not fascism.

        And, also it is impossible for a business to unambigiously distance themselves from the fascism in those words. Too much need for more verbiage.

        Anyway, the professionals and the managers were influenced in directions too fascist, too technocratic, and too much academic-theory-must-be-real. But some of these terms are mapped onto a bunch of conflicting models, and the sh!t with academic theory is complicated and needs enough nuance that it does not make a good allusion or metaphor for a general audience. When you remove the explanations that are poor fit for the audience, you are left with ones that may work if you have a good writing session.

        Liked by 3 people

      3. I would add that both Boeing and Intel work with engineering recipes that are a little more challenging to keep doing correctly again and again. This is partly because they are spread over a lot more people than some other sorts of engineering recipes.

        The opposite extreme might well be some dude’s doctoral project, though those have to be communicated between two to six people, so there are smaller more single persony projects. Just that the examples of doctoral projects are a lot easier to show someone an example of than many of the smaller engineering projects are.

        Doctoral dissertations, and these big bureaucracy massive engineering projects tend to be the more fully documented engineering projects. (Doctoral dissertations in engineering are also often recipes very difficult to replicate. The dude who can do the thing is trying to get a rubberstamp, he is not trying to teach students with a more basic grounding how to do the really obscure shit that he maybe did correctly. )

        There is really nothing like trying to dig into a bunch of publicly available records to try to learn how to do a cool obscure engineering task to really show a certain set of the challenges and uncertainties of a modern technical society. If the dude is still alive, and you have a lot of money, you could maybe pay him to teach you in person, but if you exclude that as being a cheat, learning some of this stuff is a bit hard.

        This is partly why Totalitarian China is hosed when it comes to fully replicating US per capita economic potential. To make something actually work, you need to be able to say that it does not actually work.

        For the complicated recipes, you need to be able to communicate with a wide range of in house experts, honestly, and synthesize from that to whether the big thing is actually working.

        I basically know just enough from the outside to understand that Boeing and Intel did some hard things, when they were delivering.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. Kind of odd, but while I get very annoyed (why do I have to shift-right-click to make 7zip unzip files unlike Win10 just right-click) with Win11 I find I’m not having the same issues others are reporting. Of course, I have a Pro version (Win10 Pro license key worked, yay) and I disabled quite a few “features” *cou-copilot-gh* as much as possible so maybe that’s why.

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  12. The Artificial Idiots are useful as hell at times, but they remain idiots. Never rely on them for anything important (I say as I start writing up a way to use them that should wildly increase reliability for certain tasks if it works out)

    Liked by 1 person

  13. He didn’t fill in the ‘replace’ box, simple dumb mistake; thought the computer would know what to replace it with, thinks the computer is a magic box. Yikes.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. There are an awful lot of people out there faking their way through adulthood. They get by on social skillz.

      We, the dorks and weirdos who have no social skillz, must actually know what the f- we’re doing to get by. This makes the fakers extra annoying.

      If the AI-pocalypse wipes out the jobs of 5 out of ten social-skillz Normies and sends them back to school to get a f-ing clue, I will consider it a net plus for society and Western Civilization.

      Yes, I might be a little salty about it.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. thing is, you see, I think that there are a lot of people who would do less damage if they were moved somewhere away from the schools

        I am maybe relentlessly cynical about what types of mental function problems the schools are at all equipped to remedy. Some might say excessively so.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. I meant to send them back as students. And make them pay for it too, by God. Retrained to a job that AI sucks at. Like painting or welding.

          I did not mean to suggest that the lazy, worthless schmoozers displaced from middle management by a computer should be allowed to teach. [shudder] What a nightmarish idea.

          Liked by 1 person

      2. As someone who feels seen by your “dorks and weirdos” characterization, one of the most frustrating experiences I had people managing and later project managing was interacting with the “team project” folks who managed to skate actually doing anything throughout their academic careers thanks to modern edumacation theories and practice.

        Sometimes the thing just needs to get done, but these individuals avoided ever doing any “done” themselves, so I got to be the shock and awe deliverer. Not what I wanted to do, but the alternative was doing it myself, and there is only so much myself to go around.

        I am glad to not be doing that stuff any more.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. “…the “team project” folks…”

          Uugh… Those ‘individuals’ were the main reason I fled the academic life for construction. There’s really nothing worse than being the only person in the room that’s done the reading and understands the requirements on a “team project.” Including the team leader.

          Particularly when the ex-cheerleaders think that every project in the world is a pep rally or a school dance. “I’ll be in charge of banners!” said Suzy, the perky one.

          Liked by 3 people

          1. I’m so glad I went through before the, “team project,” thing in college.

            Had to do one in the Army “college,” I worked my way into, but all the participants were productive adults, no slackers. Made it easier.

            Like

    2. Back in the mid-1980s, a friend commented wrt PCs: “There are people who never wonder what’s inside the box. And there are people who can’t stand not to know.”

      Liked by 1 person

  14. “Midjourney had decided that man and kneeling is somehow salacious and won’t allow me to do it.”

    Because it was programed in San Francisco. ‘Nuff said. (Yes, I might be a little cranky today.)

    “Well, today I found that my credit card and Amazon are both now using AI for fraud detection. And doing so stupidly.”

    On the one hand, given the -staggering- amount of fraud going on at all levels of society, from the street to retail to wholesale to federal government (Hello, Minnesota. We warned you, but you ignored us, and now look where we are eh?) I am not surprised that Amazon and credit card company has all manner of fraud prevention whatnot.

    But on the other hand, I’m also not surprised to hear that it is stupid. This is because we are not their customers. Data brokers and advertisers are their real customers. That’s where they make all their money. We are the –product– they sell. “Fraud Prevention” is a buzzword they tack onto things to show their insurance carriers that they are “trying”. Insurance carriers go along with the gag because they’re making megabucks, the losses are a drop in the bucket.

    The fact that they don’t really care about the fraud and the porch-pirates etc. can be deduced from the amazingly lax enforcement from city/state/federal levels. Amazon is the biggest dog in the park. If they were suffering from fraud and theft, the cops would be all over it.

    (Also if they cared a single damn about selling books, their search and selection tools would be 1000% better. Let’s not sugar coat it, there is AI-generated garbage sitting -way- higher in Amazon Ranking than our books. Is the AI-slop better? Or even readable? No, but it’s satisfying their idiotic sort algo, because the “authors” are gaming it. And Amazon is letting them. Because they’re not trying to sell the books, in my oh-so-humble opinion.)

    Also also, all the other stuff they sell isn’t really worth anything. You know all the power tools and furnishings and whatnot that get returned? They do not sort it. At all. Returns are stacked on pallets and sold as-is. (By weight I think, but I could be wrong about that.) Pennies on the dollar, anyway. Plenty of YouTube videos about guys buying pallets of power tools, fixing them up and selling them.

    So yeah. Not shocking to hear that they’re firing humans and turning the whole thing over to crappy software that doesn’t really work. Because they do not care if they p1ss us off.

    Farmers don’t care if the cows are angry so long as the dairy is happy.

    I’m thinking we might want to do something about that. Don’t know what, but the answer will present itself presently I’m sure.

    Liked by 1 person

  15. OK, I’ve read all the commerts (so far), and this is why they put me on panels about AI. I have a few brief, and hopefully entertaining, essays about what AI is and is not, and why it seems simultaneously stupid and brilliant. https://frank-hood.com/2024/01/10/fear-and-envy-of-ai/ Hopefully Sarah is correct and we’re only going through the early 80’s phase of, “It’s the computer’s fault,” until people get more savvy.

    Like

    1. Excellent essay, Frank. “AI isn’t intelligent and never will be” is the thing I wish I was hearing more out there.

      Bees are not intelligent. What they are is incredibly well programmed. Refined through 120 million years, and probably a refinement of a different sort of bug that was 100++ million years old when bees got started.

      Any individual bee is -much- more capable than the latest and greatest “AI” running on the biggest hardware there is. It isn’t even close.

      But what do I hear out there? AI-pocalypse!!!

      I think Bob said it best today. There an awful lot of “consensus creates reality” going on out there. As weirdos and Odds (and engineers) all know far too well, Reality is that thing that comes along and bites a chunk out of your corporate consensus’s @ss, then stomps it into the dirt.

      May the Gods speed the day.

      Liked by 2 people

  16. Regarding AI … Used to be I could goto (it is a word, *programming word, it counts, especially here now) support chats online and get a person (particularly good when I’m being hubby, and I’d need “his permission” to do something that he told/asked me todo (also a word see*). He gets “irritated” when I have to have him tell the **representative I can do this.) Then these chats went to AI, but eventually you could get a person (lots of “not answered” options to “Do you want a live person?”). Now? The last never comes up, and I have to call and go through the phone AI. (Can you hear me screaming now?)

    (**) Usually prefaced with “We’ve been married since before there was dirt (47 years, in 2 weeks), I don’t know who is primary.” I also use “as the wife, it is my job to deal with support.” (Also why most everything, now, has me as primary. He can figure out that if I die first. Exception is healthcare where we can’t have me as primary, just “if incapacitated”. Since these calls are not when he is incapacitated, that doesn’t count. At that question the response is “don’t tempt me” as I hand off the phone on speaker.)

    (*) I too am a programmer, software design. Just because I am not designing software and writing code now does not change that. I’ve been pulling the “I write and support software, try another excuse” to the “it is the computer’s fault” since the mid-late ’80s. I love the “ID 10 T” response. Unfortunately the representative on the end of the phone call is probably going to know what that means, if I use that reply to it was an AI problem.

    Interestingly enough Amazon AI examples listed here has caught “not fraud” as “fraud”, but couldn’t catch the fraud that sister got on her Amazon account. A $500 charge for a shipment to a new address, and not even in the same state. Took two calls to get it fixed. Hadn’t hit the credit card to flag as fraud. Her daughter, a legit account user, caught the purchase. For reasons she knew mom and dad weren’t buying a new suitcase, let alone one that expensive (ever), in the foreseeable future (sis can’t even walk on the broken limb yet), and no one needed that item.

    Like

    1. The only programming question I have for LLMs is how to do headers in Markdown.

      This is because I already know the answer, and am not going to forget it soon, and so it is an obviously hilarious question to ask.

      Additionally, if I did not know the answer, it might be a good example of what to ask. The other category of example that is good role modeling is “was Harry Potter Jack the Ripper?”

      Of course, the problem with this second specific example, is that it may make too many assumptions about what the audience already knows and understands.

      Like

    2. *dumps a gallon of Holy Water on Dep. Thou shalt NOT use the word “goto”. Ever. NO! *holds up Cross* Get thee back and do not darken here! Ever! I see you and the different forms you take, Leave, Iter, and more! Get thou structure breaking, chaos inducing, entropy accelerant and exit the area!

      *ahem* Sorry, I may have a firm opinion on the usage of Goto’s in any language that has subroutines/procedures/functions, that include stakes, honey and fire ants. Vlad was nice. The number of times I’ve had to work on code that people have just slapped a goto in because “it was faster” rather than understanding what was going on, stakes I say.

      In all seriousness once you add a goto to code, you can no longer trust the flow so it takes much longer to make sure any change works/doesn’t break anything, and I’ve had most of my career playing cleanup to the “they work so fast so you fix the issues so the other new projects get done”.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

        😁Not wrong. Been there. Seen the fallout.

        Just I started with COBOL that did not allow Begin/End or “{ }” bracketed loops for If/then/else, and other possible grouped functionality (while, until, for, etc.). And the flavor type wasn’t “if question then function else function.”, it was “if question then goto function else goto function.” Yes, the period at to end the entire statement was critical. Yes the spaghetti code fallout was interesting. As was finding missing or misplaced periods. The C/C++ rewrite was a heck of a lot cleaner (believe it or not).

        Like

          1. You really want to trigger me, used to have some co-wokers that would haze new developers by having them ask me “I ran out of indicators, what do I do now?” (RPG III)

            Wind me up, and haze the newbie in one operation. They were efficient.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Wow. RPG takes me back. That was the IBM System36/AS400 code from a small consulting firm a few months mid-80s. It’s been so long that I’ve forgotten all but the bare minimum. The COBOL, OTOH, I was neck deep for 7 years (along with C, C++, and dBASE).

              Like

        2. I remember COBOL from college. There was a running joke on how many errors you could create with just 1 missing period. Never had to do much COBOL other than a couple hack jobs on existing programs.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. “running joke on how many errors you could create with just 1 missing period

            –

            Yes.

            Now think back. Pretty sure humanity went to the moon and back on Cobol code. Which is super scary when one has been neck deep in business (well forestry statistics) COBOL code.

            Like

          2. Friend of mine retired to drive around the country full-time RV-ing thanks to the money he made coding Y2K fixes in COBOL for desperate clients.

            Liked by 1 person

          3. First FORTRAN class, the instructor posted a short program that had pages and pages of error messages from the compiler. Seems the compiler is picky about commas separating variables in DIMENSION statements.

            But GOTO is fun when you can use labels … GOTO HELL; GOTO THE_DEVIL… Always wanted a COMEFROM command.

            Like

            1. The sysadmin at my College 1.0 computer lab annoyed me greatly. Did some really shitty stuff to some friends.

              There were a bunch of VAX terminals, and a generic “anyone is free to use” account called “vaxuser”. (bad move. very bad move)

              So I set up random timed scripts on each available to compile a garbage output file, basically save executable as text, and then randomly shoot that at the big dot-matrix printer from a random other terminal. Over and over. And respawn and repeat and….

              Problem: whole classes were set up to use “vaxuser”, so you cant just dump that account.

              -Epic- rage fest as the printer blew up again and again. sysadmin hating on life, users hating on sysadmin.

              Good times. (grin)

              Like

      2. There actually are some (“edge”) cases where a GOTO can be good code; almost always it’s to insert some feature the language-makers left out (leave/break from a loop ; continue to the next run of the loop ; exit from, say, three nested loops right straight to the end). Not to mention such things as label or function/procedure variable values in languages like C (easy-button threaded code, in a high-level language, anyone?).

        However, almost anything like I just said is not “programming with gotos” — it’s using kinds of high-level control structures that aren’t there (quite, yet, until you make them), and that are inevitably well documented as such (“LEAVE all the loops here via GOTO”). “Programming with gotos” is very, very different — using those, elementally and atomically, as control structures — as if all the if-then-else and do-loop and all the multi-decade rest simply had never happened. (See, e.g., ancient FORTRAN programs, sheesh. And, “Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first teach BASIC.”)

        It’s like reading and understanding dis-assembled ‘optimized’ machine code, where even the very statement boundaries have disappeared. In a ‘high-level’ language. Except for the fact those lost in the mists of time code-perpetrators likely didn’t know any better and wouldn’t understand their problem anyway, I’d likely sign on to endorsing “meet Vlad your new ‘efficient’ coding friend” too.

        Like

      2. And sometimes the person agrees with you once you explain why you’re growling at them. Sometimes. I try to tone it down once I get to the human.

        Also, want the marketers to get rid of all three freaking ads they put on the voicemail. It does not improve my disposition.

        Liked by 1 person

  18. The really funny thing is Asimov alluded to all of these issues with AI in his Robot books, especially the earlier ones. A lot of it being the contradictions and conflicts between his 3 Laws, but also with humans in general.

    Like

  20. The Grok Imagine program gives you *lots* of images when you put in a prompt. Pages and pages of them. I’ve also found when I look at an image a page or so in that it might have a different prompt than the one I gave. Which is both helpful and scary, especially when I like those images better.

    Note: Grok is changing the Imagine program fast. Usually for the better, especially in the 6 second video portion.

    Liked by 1 person

  21. “When something is made idiot proof, they will just make better idiots.”

    — Stephen Hawking

    and

    “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
    ― Douglas Adams,

    Like

    1. It’s not better idiots, or more ingenious fools; it’s just that there are so many fools and idiots that they will do every stupid thing possible. It’s the Infinite Number Of Monkeys Principle in action.

      And smart people are not good at anticipating the stupid things idiots will do. “They did what?!?!?“

      Liked by 1 person

          1. Still mildly bummed about the antenna erection procedure I didn’t hurry through. Someone died and I wondered if a faster rewrite would have helped.

            OTOH, the unit installed it on a fiberglass pole and there were two other, “I know what the book says, but…” or maybe they didn’t check the book.

            At any rate, when a 50 or 60-pound cylinder with spikes protruding from top and bottom cracks the fiberglass pole and swings down like a pendulum, the poor sod at the bottom of the arc is out of luck.

            Liked by 1 person

              1. Definitely one man per erection. Otherwise it gets weird. (I’m sorry. I have a headache and the coffee hasn’t kicked in. This makes me twelve. Make a note, we should never drink together. We’ll shock the men.)

                Like

                1. There was also a, “two man erection procedure.”

                  My beloved is used to it. My mind has been in the gutter for decades.

                  Like

                  1. As the ancient response goes, “Kindly get your mind out of the gutter, so mine can float by.”

                    I spent my first wedding anniversary erecting things … radio antennae for the National Guard. Probably six or seven of us.

                    Liked by 1 person

      2. Fiddled with some small applications at one job, and had the actual user try stuff out. Did that enough that she was no longer a ‘naive user’ and had to try other folks – she had begun to think like a programmer.

        Meyers’ The Art of Software Testing was really useful to make me think of weird stuff users do.

        Software always works perfectly until you let users on the system …

        Like

      3. Spend 35 years at it and while you can’t anticipate what will happen, nothing will surprise you. Instead of “they did what?!?!?” it’ll be “Sigh. Of coarse they did.”

        Like

        1. It’s the “How did you do THAT???” that gives me the headaches. Because they never remember just what was done, the order or keystrokes or anything. But can replicate it every time your not watching. *sigh

          Liked by 1 person

          1. “But can replicate it every time your not watching. *sigh“

            –

            Try doing this over the phone.

            Used to get a kick out of clients calling with something that isn’t working. I ask them to “walk me through what you were doing”. Only to get to the part that was “failing”, pregnant pause, “It is working now!” Um. Okay.

            There were those what I called “coincidence calls”. Someone would call with a problem. Not a bug, but a misunderstanding. Never an easy one to figure out either, because on a phone call. Get client on correct path. Great right? Especially since all of a sudden get a flurry of exact same calls. By the 3rd call there would be a written document with pictures.

            Like

            1. Been there. Did that. Early in my career, well even today but it’s a lot easier to screen share. And got rid of the “Press Any Key to Continue” messages/sayings right darn early. Changed to “Press the Space Bar to Continue”, as that is how the key was labeled. Much cleaner.

              Like

              1. “lot easier to screen share.“

                –

                Definitely. We had that the last 3 or 4 years. Of coarse we still had IT that wouldn’t allow that of their users unless IT was sitting there. Never mind we had VPN access to the live server and data, and we had snapshot of the live data for testing anytime we needed it. Mickey Mouse (fake test data) wouldn’t work. Too often (always) it was something in the live data needed to figure out what was going on. Like to say we eventually converted all those IT, but that’d not be true. Most, not all.

                Like

          2. I like to create videos, if not of my keystrokes, then at least what screens are appearing.

            I haven’t yet succeeded at having the IT ticketing system successfully transmit one of my videos though.

            Like

      4. “And smart people are not good at anticipating the stupid things idiots will do.”

        You can’t predict random chaos.

        But also, I’ve seen “smart” people do some amazingly stupid sh1t. “You did what? Are you kidding me with this? WTF is wrong with you?” If I had a nickel for every time…

        Like

    2. Quotes like that always put me in mind of both folks ranting about dumb ranchers, and my folks (ranchers) ranting about idiot town kids.

      All too often, it’s not a lack of intelligence, it’s either different starting assumptions or a different focus, which is then treated as the one true way. Even– heck, especially– when that assumption can’t be supported.

      When we’d be better off thinking about How To Secure a Building.

      U S Army – The Army would secure a building by locking all doors, put bars on the windows, and establish one entrance with a guard post and armed guards and carefully check the IDs of all personnel who try to enter.

      U S Navy – The Navy would secure a building by swabbing all decks, turn off all coffee pots, turn off all lights, lock all office doors, and lock all entrances as they leave the building.

      U S Marines – The Marines would secure a building by assaulting it with a combined arms team, breaking into all interior rooms, shooting all resistance, and planting demolition charges as they evacuate in an orderly manner. They would then level the building to prevent further enemy use.

      U S Air Force – The Air Force would secure a building by having the Base Contracting Officer negotiate a three-year lease with a option to purchase.

      A ton of the “stupid AI” stories are basically folks going to a dictionary to find what comes after marriage, and screaming it’s stupid and wrong because the dictionary says “marrow” comes after “marriage.”

      Liked by 2 people

      2. I used one of the dedicated academic LLMs to get information on a current events topic. This one shows sources. They were all Left or hard Left, in favor of the topic I had it review. Now, I knew that based on the results generated, but I could not get this particular LLM to find sites opposed to the topic.

        GIGO.

        Liked by 2 people

    3. Which saved my sanity when programming. I knew ID 10 T users would figure out how to break something, not crash, but garbage in/out, every single time. Usually under “you can have it fast, or fixed-JIC (recalculate/lookup), not both”. (True situation.) What was really fun was manager A insisted on one solution, manager B insisted on another, manager C insisted on a 3rd. My solution? “You three work it out.” Fun ones were when there was one contact for the client. Think that’d be better? Ha Ha Ha – Seriously? No.

      Not the only time this happened, but happened in the last few days before I retired. Got a request through the contact, my boss said quote it, quoted it, got approval, did request and delivered, told boss so it could be billed (not an inexpensive change either). Then I get the call, from the same contact, that someone (probably higher on the managerial food chain) didn’t like the change. Change it back. My response was “Um, you paid for this change. Are you sure? Need request in writing.” With, as is said now, receipts. This client was notorious for this. Never heard back before I was gone. Given the change, the client in question, if something had happened within the next 3 to 6 months, I would have heard about it from one of my moles.

      Like

      1. Ha!

        Never had to deal directly with clients for such (database server software, not applications), but did talk to a couple VPs on the point. If a change would be in the overall plan for the product, but not in the immediate plan, would quote a couple million for the change. If outside the plan, just would say that. If the change would be ‘coming soon anyway’, sometimes would offer the client the opportunity to be a beta tester.

        Like

        1. I only had about 7 years where I didn’t work directly with clients. Until ’96 clients were co-workers, same employer, different departments. Then for 7 years I wrote software so programmers could write software for the hardware the company made. Technically I had a “support” department between me and the end client. The last 12 years “what ‘support’ department?” Coders were the client support. Every client was a beta tester, on all changes. For all practical purposes there were no “releases” in the standard sense. Essentially levels of changes from support:

          • Easy: came under annual support agreement, unless they’d been abusing it, then quote it.
          • New client: Pretty much whatever as long as the underlining interface not hit (huge oh hell no).
          • Moderate: Was it in the annual list? How big of a deal? Fast? Might be told quote it, or not.
          • Not quick easy change: Quote it.
          • Interface change: Went on the list. If an insist, then very large humongous quote.

          Last one. Not many pushed it. But the example I mentioned above? That was one where a client came back and said “Yes. Do it.” Quote was double the annual maintenance cost (not 1 million, but not cheap either).

          Interface changes meant a big “formal rollout” and no matter how it was planned it was a PIA. Because no subordinate installs could be installed until the client installed the formal rollout. Which too often involved their IT. Easier (on us) once our (required) installation tool wouldn’t allow subordinate installs until formal rollout install was done. Not easier on the end user. (XYZ change didn’t work, complaint. Well, yes. ABC isn’t installed yet, so XYZ isn’t installed yet.)

          Like

          1. I remember SAP coming into replace the Army parts system software. Old system was on COBOL, and COBOL specialists were getting very thin on the ground.

            SAP guys come in and tell the assembled parts/supply specialists, “Your system is complete crap. We’re not saving any features, it’s all crap. No, we aren’t asking you for suggestions, we’re telling you your system is crap. You ought to be glad we’re gonna fix everything to our standards.”

            Thereby alienating a room full of old sweats who had been keeping the system running by sheer willpower for a couple of decades and knew every trick/shortcut in the nonexistent book for keeping the troops supplied. A fair number were retired sergeants.

            Bad idea. Bad, bad idea.

            I think SAP failed completely and I have no idea what the system runs on now. But probably not COBOL.

            Like

              1. What’s wrong with that sentence? She’s talking about a parts system used by the Army. (No, not those ‘Army Parts’) 😄

                It’s a common shortcut for ‘a parts inventory, tracking and requisition system’

                Like

            2. Every ERP system I’ve ever had the displeasure of using is of the opinion that ‘You need to do it our way’.

              They are inevitably wrong. Bigger companies pay for customization. Everyone actually runs on Excel, only updating the ‘official’ system when absolutely necessary.

              Like

            3. I also suffered under an imposition of SAP.

              I used to work for a company that made the world’s best VME computer boards based on the MC68040, MC68060 and PowerPC processor chips. For years, we used a PCB schematic design system we called Stanware. Because the head engineer and company co-owner Stan wrote it, in ELisp, and maintained it. He was constantly adding features. Real features, that made our jobs easier.

              The company was bought by Huge Defense Contractor. (No, not that one. Not that one either.) They started by sacking almost the entire sales department. “We’ve already got a sales department, don’t need another one.” Of course, these were all the people familiar with our products. When for some inexplicable reason our sales dropped like a rock in the next quarter, they started laying off engineering and production staff.

              Turns out we were beating them in the VME processor board performance race and they wanted to eliminate the competition.

              One of their next diktats was ‘Scrap Stanware and switch over to SAP!’

              Which was buggy, hard to use, and just plain didn’t do a lot of the stuff Stanware did for our workflow. I got sacked in the 3rd round of layoffs, so I don’t know what happened after that. There were 8 of us, all had worked there for 10 years or more. We got called into a conference room and told “Sign this. You have one hour to pack your personal stuff and get out of the building.”

              Like

              1. Ouch.

                I missed that degrading walk out. Should have. But I was with son and besties at scout camp in the middle of the Willamette forest wilderness. No cell coverage. One of the engineers being kept did call hubby and leave a message that I needed to call in. Hubby came up with the resupply run mid week with the message. My response was “what part of no cell coverage didn’t they understand?” Had to use the camp analog phone to get out. You know hike to the top of the ridge (I had horrible blisters too), stand just right, did get out on the 3rd try, I think. Tried to get to person needed but unavailable – “leave message”. Told receptionist I’d leave a message, but they were not getting back. Phone worked call out only. Got told it’d wait until I was back.

                Sure enough first thing the next week got “the talk”. Asked to not be shepherded out (then come back after hours for stuff … Yea, no.) Department manager (he knew he was on his way out) was so angry about losing anyone, he said sure, take my time to clear my stuff (I did). So I was still there to go around before leaving to say goodbye.

                For reasons couple of the other engineers tried to swap for me going (it was a 10% across the board, no excuses). Both engineers when they saw me still there that first day back late morning both said “good, you were spared”; because should have been escorted out immediately. There were logical reasons I was one of the 10% in our department chosen, that I couldn’t argue with. Sucked but … The swap wasn’t accepted. PTB just accepted their resignation as a bonus on top of the 10%. Other than our manager the remainder were never let go. They were core of the hardware/OS engineers for our department and eventually ended up with a major corporation doing what they were doing.

                FWIW even coming that close to one of those exits is chilling.

                The other prior shutdown, got a call from direct supervisor to go to a company wide meeting at a specific theater. Wasn’t suppose to but he told me why, so no surprise for me. Had a month to finish up and clear desk. It was a long month.

                Like

                1. “They were core of the hardware/OS engineers for our department and eventually ended up with a major corporation doing what they were doing.”

                  I worked at Ingres. While I was there, we were bought 3 separate times, the last by Computer Associates out of Long Island.

                  They did the classic ‘what would you say you do here?’ interviews. They asked folks who wrote multi-platform device drivers how they felt about doing COBOL.

                  Comes The Day of Takeover, we were all individually invited to come up to 4th floor and sign new employment agreements.

                  After listening to the experiences of some of the folks earlier than our times, I looked at at a friend and asked “Jen, do you want to work for these guys?”. She shook her head and we both went up to a different office and told them no thanks.

                  They were quite pro-active; they had termination checks ready for everyone. And they did escort us out.

                  No hard numbers, but I think about 50% of the developers/testers bailed that day. Pretty much all of those had new jobs elsewhere within a month.

                  Been there, done that, and we had a party about 6 weeks later where I literally got the t-shirt which had a graph of all the places we wound up.

                  Ingres folks always did have cool t-shirts.

                  Like

                  1. …about 50% of the developers/testers bailed that day. Pretty much all of those had new jobs elsewhere within a month.

                    No doubt. Such purges (and/or management-mandated “improvements”) cause lots of Institutional Memory to Leave The Building.

                    My last workplace (God willing!) bought itself a Newer, Fancier Facility, with Focus-Grouped Features clearly intended to Look Good to customers.

                    But the new “feng shue” meant the staff did twice the walking for the same amount of productivity.

                    Worse, the New Pretty cost more than they thought. So they decided, as weasels will, that Payroll was the place to “economize” on.

                    I don’t guess anybody here thinks I was too cooperative (or diplomatic) about calling their prion-infested deer a horse. “The best people will be the first to leave!” said I to the Suits. Nonetheless, despite my efforts to keep them from cutting my department, my department remained uncut.

                    But other departments lost a lot of their best (i.e. most experienced, i.e. highest paid) people.

                    I bailed about a year later; the decline in general competence was putting too much pressure on my conscience, attitude, and mouth.

                    Just as well; all this was about the time that H.R. departments’ Average Hair was starting to get shorter and purple-er. They’d have pushed me if I hadn’t jumped.

                    Online reviews weren’t yet much of A Thing when I left, but the original place had an excellent reputation.

                    I googled them a while back. The current consensus is, essentially, “gosh-forsaken heck-hole.”

                    Pretty building, tho.

                    Like

                  2. The company I worked for was bought out. Complimentary businesses. One was flat bed checkout scanners. The other was handheld scanners and computers (like Intermec/Symbol). Ironic the partners of our firm had gone to the owners of the other to try and buy just that business section. Instead we got acquired by the umbrella company. Did well on the stock both personal and vested stock options. Not OMG dollars. But at least made money. Company went under less than 36 months later. At least we got paid for our stock. New company stock was not traded.

                    The only overlap was IT and support division. IT was cut 100% (all 3 of them). But before they did the new IT pulled something that the old IT had already tried (to their benefit, old IT tried to warn them). Guess what IT’s solution was to servers getting viruses? Locked ALL computers down to installations. Including engineering R&D who wrote software (both OS and application). To compile we had to call IT to unlock our machines. We obviously only did that once and a while. Right? Right? Come on you know you all just about lost your eyes under the couch again (sorry if the keyboard got wet). We made sure the point that compiling happened multiple times an hour (um, every few minutes), very very clear (the other company didn’t do much application programming, we had two major applications that pulled hardware purchases). Note, when they pulled this they had to come clear across town to unlock our machines (late ’90s, remote access to workstations not there, yet).

                    Liked by 1 person

                1. Don’t you know? You’re supposed to replace all uses of the D-word with “war” now. Sec’y of War, Department of War… “war contractor”.

                  Mmf. Help, my tongue feemf to be ftuck in my cheek and I can’t clofe my mouff!

                  Liked by 1 person

            5. LOL.

              Not armed services. I understand the feeling of the sys admins. When the division assets (timberlands) were sold and the offices were shutdown. There was a big meeting with the division and top managers of the three area with the owners and big managers of the two entities that were splitting the assets at the area office I worked out of. Was coming out my office during one of their breaks (100% unattended). Introductions. Division manager stated they should hire me. Area managers agreed. Both the other parties stated “we have enough programmers”. Okay. Then. Don’t get me wrong I was actually glad to get to say goodby to the current kludge we’d been dealing with.

              System their staff was inheriting was Xenix on PC servers running COBOL software and database. Two systems, main one in central office, secondary (backup and kept in sync) in coastal office, northern office called in (it was ’90s) to use the main one. Kludge? Well the main office one had failed, badly. (Backups available. Not that problem.) Needed new hardware (needed anyway for new GIS interfaced system in design stage). No problem? Right?

              Get the only hardware we could. Pentium PC. Xneix requires 5.25″ floppy install using A: drive. Can’t get A: and B:, 3.5 drive, to swap. Not allowed. Okay. Call Xenix support to get 3.5 disks. Are not available. Plus will not run on Pentium. Okay. Upgrade to Unix, and also have to upgrade COBOL. Get everything install. Code compiles without problems. “Appears to work.” Until we look at the test data. The two different compiles changes the data format. Sigh. This software had a three year testing cycle (this is happening before the surprise announcement of sale, and at year-end when the growth model needs to run, accurately). Now what?

              We reinstall the data, test the Xenix compile on the COBOL installation. Matches the output from backup machine. Thus any tweaks (statistic growth model calculations) to the software I could make the changes in the Unix COBOL, send the files over dialup to the backup machine, compile, test on backup machine, bring the EXE back, over dialup, test on main machine, compare. Repeat as needed. I documented all this. Plus, we were in the process, infant stages (design done, coding started, barely) of replacing the whole system with C++/C coding with an SQL backbone into a GIS system (barely installed),Then it gets better.

              There was also the smaller major and less major programs used throughout the division. These PC DOS systems were combination of dBASE IV and C/C++. C code wasn’t a problem. The problem was dBASE newest upgrade release had made a bug out of a “feature” I used the heck out of throughout most the programs. So new of a problem that I hadn’t figured out how to get around this except “do not upgrade to new release!”. All documented.

              All handled by one programmer, me (well 3, if you count me, myself, and I). Division had just, barely, added a second programmer to help with creating the new system. But, this was the status of everything handed off to their multiple programmers between the two companies (1/2 dozen, each). They did call me to consult (about 6 months later) on one of the PC major systems. For reasons, not the least of which was they weren’t willing to take very critical specific free advice, I said “No thank you.”

              Like

            6. At a previous job, I was working at a small subsidiary of a massive conglomerate. The subsidiary produced specialized and customizable equipment for its customers. It used an old text-based database app that ran on AS400 emulation. The default colors were the old monochrome green and black.

              I was told that every few years the head office would send some SAP experts over to bring the subsidiary’s database into SAP just like the rest of the company. And the experts would confidently arrive, all set to do the job…

              … until they got a look at the requirements of the existing database that would need to be replaced, and run away screaming.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. SAP, or a version is still available. Plus a lot of equivalent options. One of the systems that the last job I held where the system fed SAP systems data.

                Boss had an interesting conversation with the county the company was located in. They wanted their SAP system to feed the specialized data. Works for header records, kind of. But not the detail records. Reason why the software could feed SAP installs is because the data could be sent direct as entered, or summarized based on any criteria wanted. Usually the latter. Harder to break down summaries, when all the data isn’t there. Did not get the contract.

                Like

              2. SAP has really really good sales folks.

                Naturalicht they personally don’t have to fulfill any of those promises they made…

                Like

                1. I don’t know if it was SAP or not. But company I worked for got a new county department (public works) at the same time the entire county got new SAP type software. The department was up and running (almost) as soon as the ink was dry on the contract. The other contract had multiple people onsite for six months or more. Not department VS entire county because the company had clients that were an entire county, installation didn’t go any different. Boss just had more training days, and the only one ever onsite. Still wasn’t months to get them up and running.

                  Liked by 1 person

    4. Anyone who says a thing is “foolproof” has not met a sufficiently wide variety of fools. Or tried to use it before his morning coffee, or after enough Irish coffee.

      Like

  22. several similar charges in short succession is a very common fraud thing. The model, which was probably machine learning not AI %- whatever ai is — probably should have accounted for it being books and such, book buying not being common fraud, but Amazon might have fubar coding. It actually sounds reasonable to me. Just sayin

    Like

    2. Which is weird because one can buy a group in a series easily. I also find myself single click book purchase. Plus through the Kindle Android app, now that purchasing books is possible again, that is the way it works, one at a time. Both Amazon and Nook (latter through the Windows app, which “technically” can’t get anymore).

      Liked by 1 person

    3. @ BGE > ” book buying not being common fraud”

      Ah, yes, I have benefitted from that perception in the past (way past, still in the 20th century).

      #1 Traveling to see grandparents in AZ, stopped at a bookstore we passed in Flagstaff, because why not? Pre-credit-card days, not enough cash (because, books, right?), but the shopkeeper was fine with an out-of-state check. So I asked why.

      “People who come to bookstores don’t usually pass bad checks.”

      #2 At my favorite used bookstore in the Big City Nearby, I had come out without enough cash OR my checkbook. Said Saul, the owner, “Just mail me one when you get home.”

      You don’t get that kind of community from Amazon.

      Liked by 1 person

  23. What I used to do when I still bought ebooks from Amazon, was buy a digital Amazon gift card and have it added to my Amazon gift card balance. Then buy the ebooks using that balance. Since there was only the 1 transaction involving credit / debit card, it avoided tripping situations like this.

    Having spent the last year playing around with AI image generation, and spending a lot of time reading through r/StableDiffusion as a lurker, I certainly understand that the current “AI” is really statistical pattern-matching.

    There are thoughts out there on how to train a future AI so it has some sort of “world model” and could actually “reason” within that framework. Then the underlying problem would be bumped up from the dataset the humans selected to the world model the humans programmed.

    Real General Artifical Intelligence might have to wait until quantum computing scales up and becomes common.

    Liked by 1 person

  24. “Midjourney had decided that man and kneeling is somehow salacious and won’t allow me to do it”

    Seeing men in a pose of submission makes the more radical feminists feel hot and bothered. Wouldn’t want such… *stimulating*… images getting out in the public.

    :P

    Like

    1. “Colin Kapernick, paging Colin Kapernick…”

      (Anyone who honestly reacted “who??” co-wins the Internet today.)

      Liked by 1 person

        1. My response was “Who?” And, just scrolled on. Until your post.

          Same.

          Now. “Oh. Him.” Even then it is “He did some stupid stunt.” Football? Right?

          Like

              1. He was still a little kid when some P.E. teacher noticed that he was a true one-in-a-million natural athlete. He’d been the Big Fish in every pond from K-12 through college; that and a Race Card (whose value was just starting to take off) had gotten him off every hook he’d ever swallowed. It never occurred to him that the NFL would be any different. Oops.

                Liked by 2 people

                1. NFL and professional sports in general is chock full of one-in-a-million talents. They are the narrow right hand pointy end of the athleticism bell curve. Which means there’s another person without your attitude who can easily replace you.

                  Like

                  1. A-yup. Being merely one-in-a-million put him at the barely-squeaked-in Fat Left of a whole ‘nother curve.

                    I feel intensely ambivalent about the poor dumb brassard. Golden Child Syndrome.

                    Being More Trouble Than It’s Worth works in self-de-you-know-what. It blows at self-promotion.

                    Liked by 2 people

  25. I’m a big cult/classic movie buff who likes physical media, so I buy a lot of movies from the UK from companies that have local distribution rights to titles that the US distributors won’t release. And since shipping is high I wait to make larger orders at once, rather than pay nearly as much for one or two titles. Turns out that’s a great way to get the clankers to immediately cut off my credit card. Then send an email that I can’t tell from a phishing scam saying I need to click a link to confirm I haven’t been hacked. Only found out it was legit (and that my movie order hadn’t been paid for) when I went to the store and my card got rejected.

    And as above, from a company I have done business with several times before without issues.

    Liked by 1 person

  26. I feel like the name “Artificial Intelligence” has led a lot of people to think that they’re somehow dealing with…. I don’t know. Mycroft from The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. they expect reasoning. (And even Mike didn’t really get the world. Anyone remember his “jokes?”) And so, they train it badly and use too general a case set with no exceptions and MORE IMPORTANTLY they don’t have an informed human on the other side dealing with this.

    This! This is the antidote to the worst of the AI-hype mythology. The very words “AI” (apparently coined by rivals of Norbert Wiener who didn’t like his ‘cybernetics’ from the Greek for ‘steersman’) have turned out to be one of the biggest false-advertising missteps in modern-era history. No, it isn’t. Maybe “Allegedly Intelligent” — or, to quote Michael Flynn (“Firestar” series), “Artificial Stupids.’

    Liked by 1 person

  28. I think you’re overoptimistic about calculators. I tutored mathematics back around 1980, and my experience was that a lot of students couldn’t recognize when their calculators had given them obviously wrong answers. It was exactly like students not knowing that ChatGPT has written arrant nonsense for their essays.

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    1. I am reliably informed that instructors in nursing programs around here routinely, apparently inadvertently, include the prompts that they used in the text of their test questions and study guides they give out to students.

      In ‘ctrl-C:ctrl-V’ veritas, I suppose.

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    2. In the early 70s, students mostly had slide rules and a few calculators. My physics prof would lay traps for those with calculators. Without one, you would write out the equation with the numbers in and realize that numerator numbers were twice or half the denominators numbers. You could do it in your head. Meanwhile, those with calculators were frantically punching in numbers (and making entry errors).

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  31. The ‘Intellectuals!’ believe that ‘AI’ will allow idiots that know absolutely nothing about anything to successfully use the most complex devices we have ever created. Because in their Utopia they will be the ones bossing all the know-nothing idiots around.
    ———————————
    They’re the Experts! They only sound stupid to you because you’re not as Educated! as they are.

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  32. For several years I have been calling “Artificial Intelligence Systems” by the name “Artificial Stupidity Systems”. It seems more fitting and has a better acronym.

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  33. Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » NO. THEY’RE NOT. AND THEY’RE WONDERFUL TOOLS. JUST DON’T GO THINKING THEY’RE MAGICAL:   The clanke

  34. There’s a very dated but still painful list of “fool proofs” (as in mathematical proofs) at http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/ . They’ve dropped the part about “human-shaped artichokes trying to violate the highly respected convention that vegetables should not operate computers”, though ☹️.

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  36. I am now required to use AI at Day Job, because “students need to know how to use it in order to succeed in the modern job market and at college.” GIGO is an understatement. Even when I pre-load data and sources that I have green-lit, it still fights the students and tries to mark their answers wrong if they don’t match [least-favorite on-line “encyclopedia”]

    Somewhere in the piles of pig litter is a precious pearl of usefulness. But not for what I’m trying to accomplish.

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  37. It’s hard to argue that the AI is programmed badly. Actually, AI isn’t really programmed at all. It’s a skeleton that’s programmed, which is then “trained”. The difference between programming and training is that with a program, you can (in principle) describe precisely what it does. How well that works depends on the skill of the programmer and the size of the program, but since a computer is a mechanism and a program is a description of specific actions in a specific sequence, this is clearly true. (For simplicity I’m ignoring real time programming and interrupts here, they aren’t relevant to the subject under discussion — and they too can be handled with enough care, Dijkstra’s Ph.D. thesis is all about that.)

    Training, however, means feeding vast quantities of undefined stuff into the machine, which causes its behavior to change in a way that the programmer cannot foresee or describe. I would argue that AI, by design, has unknowable properties. So the problem isn’t so much that it was programmed badly but rather than you were bitten by its unknowable properties happening to be wrong ones.

    This is why AI, at least so long as it is constructed in this manner, will necessarily be utterly unfit for any mission critical or safety critical application.

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  38. Walz is exactly the sort of person who would want to liquidate those with Down’s syndrome, so the danger exists only in his developmentally delayed and cognitively challenged mind. He’s what happens when an F-rank mind goes looking for a G somewhere senior in the ranks of the Democrat Party. Inspected and condemned. Unfit for use.

    Tell any academic booster of his that you like his thinking in their speciality, and have put him up for their next promotion. Try to get them to sign an endorsement addressed to the hiring bodies.

    For real, for real, I rate the retarded above him. Or at least many of the retarded.

    https://instapundit.com/760443/

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  40. AI? I watched a Yoo-Toob ‘what if?’ video recently. “What if ‘The Final Countdown’ really happened; if a Nimitz class aircraft carrier sailed through a hole in time to December 5 1941? And what if the writers didn’t wuss out and drag the ship back through the time hole before they could engage the Japanese planes?”

    They used a military aviation game as a simulator, set up historically accurate waves of Japanese planes, and placed a carrier loaded with F-14s southwest of Pearl Harbor. They had 6 actual players fly one F-14 each, and the rest were controlled by the game’s AI.

    There were various bugs in the game, so the F-14s couldn’t land on the carrier to re-arm and refuel, so they substituted two of the airfields on Oahu, one for players and one for AI.

    The scenario went well at first, but the AI planes ran out of missiles and then all but 3 of them got stuck orbiting about 5 miles from their airfield for the rest of the game. 2 of the 3 that did land and re-arm didn’t take off again.

    If that’s how AI performs in a war, we don’t have much to fear from Skynet. 😛

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